


The Picture Show

by aster_risk



Category: Ocean's (Movies), Ocean's 8, Ocean's Eight
Genre: 5 headcanons, Alternate Universe, F/F, Many alternate universes, Multi, and became a thing?, this started as a tumblr project
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-06-11 21:12:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15324441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: Here's how the game works:Each chapter tells a different story - some closer to canon, some wildly AU, but all of them Heist Wives in some respect. 5 vignettes that make up a larger scene.Welcome to the picture show!Chapter 5: To the surprise of no one, Debbie Ocean is sorted into Slytherin. To the surprise of everyone—most of all herself—Lou Miller is sorted into Gryffindor. But hot damn, do red and green look good together.





	1. 1944 - The Pilot at Marseilles

**Author's Note:**

> Based on requests on Tumblr for a Military AU and a Hospital AU. In 1944, Lou Miller is an Ally fighter pilot shot down in Southern France. Debbie Ocean is the war nurse who falls in love with her.

**1.**  

 _August 6, 1944._ Captain Louisa Miller plummets to the Earth in a blaze of glory over Marseilles. She is rescued from the wreckage of her craft by the Allied ground forces and evacuated to an emergency medical base. A walking miracle, the surgeon calls her, but that's what he calls every soldier who's still breathing. Once stable, she is returned (ironically, by plane) to the United States for further treatment. 

 

**2.**

_August 12, 1944._ Nurse Deborah Ocean (Debbie, if one asks nicely) covers a shift from midnight to six AM. She checks the patients' heart rates, replaces bandages, doles out pain meds to the dying. At four, she steps into room 203 with clean gauze to find the patient—a pilot shot down in Southern France—awake and alert, her face contorted in barely concealed pain. 

“You’re a lovely woman to wake to,” the pilot croaks. She reaches up to touch the stiff gauze over her cheek. “Huh,” she murmurs, running her hands down the bandages that hide second and third degree burns. “Guess I’m not dead after all.”

Her name, or so Debbie reads on her forms, is Captain Louisa Miller. “Lou,” the Captain corrects almost instantly. “First woman pilot to fly into combat for America, and the first woman to be shot out of the sky on French soil.”

Debbie’s smiles almost undetectably. “Is that how you introduce yourself to everyone?”

Lou's expressive face strains against the bandages. “It’s a right bit better than, ‘hello, I’m Lou, feel free to shift uncomfortably until you have the balls to ask how I fucked my face up.’”

“You injured a lot more than your face, Captain," Debbie replies, checking the reports. "You have a couple of months to go before your ribs and tibia heal properly.” 

“Perhaps,” she acknowledges with a crooked grin, wrinkling the gauze along her temple. “But I’m not dead, am I?”

 

 **3.**  

 _August 22, 1944._ Between her late night rounds, she sits at Lou’s bedside. Lou sleeps at odd hours, a combination of jet lag and agony. She drifts into an unbreakable slumber whenever she’s administered a fresh dose of anesthetic, and when she’s awake, cringing and wincing at the bandages that hide her skin from view, Debbie talks to her. 

“Why did you learn to fly?” she asks in the early hours of the morning. Dawn has just broken, feathering over Lou's too-pale hands. 

Lou closes her eyes and leans back into the cot. “It was exciting. It was something to do that both freed me and occupied my time." She sighs through her nose "I defied the laws of nature every moment I spent in the air,” she says wistfully. “Not to mention—” with a hint of amusement— “it infuriated my parents.”

There’s something utterly wild and transgressive about flying, breaking the laws that nature has set for mankind. There is something transgressive about Lou as well, her character and manner of speaking. She doesn’t speak as a lady ought, and Debbie finds that strangely alluring. 

“Why are you here, Debbie Ocean?” Lou inquires. Her eyes have softened to something kind, still fiery but lacking their challenge. Lou doesn’t believe in formalities, Debbie realizes. She genuinely wants to know. 

“My brother died in Normandy. I was engaged at the time, to a man up in New York, but upon Danny’s passing I decided to join the war effort." She remembers the call like it happened yesterday, a jarring shot of reality, like whiskey early in the morning. Her life dangles on a string even now, constantly a gamble, and Danny's death shoved her into living. "I decided that I wanted a career, a life of my own, and a means through which to honor my brother. So I trained to be a wartime nurse.”

“Right of you,” says Lou, and the way her voice trembles a little, Debbie knows she’s not mocking. Beneath the callous wisecracks lies a woman who fell like comet over the South of France, and in the wake of her wounds is learning to live with herself again. 

 

 **4.**  

 _September 30, 1944._ Debbie peels back the gauze with two fingers, wincing as Lou does. She hates seeing anyone in pain, least of all Lou Miller. She’s grown closer to Lou than a war nurse should get to anyone, but Lou is a dashing enigma of a woman whom Debbie’s had the pleasure to unravel. Her stomach flutters every time Lou’s honey-and-gravel contralto regales her with tales of the sky; then it aches at the implications of her feelings. 

She is attracted to Lou, and quite certain the pilot is attracted to her—though Lou has never been outright about her sexuality (how could she be), there’s a roundabout honesty to everything she says. When she tells Debbie, “you’re very beautiful,” she means it from her heart and not her tongue. 

“Do I want to look?” Lou asks her now, as Debbie with a pair of tweezers discards the remaining gauze. 

“It’s up to you,” Debbie assures her, because really that’s all she can do. She was there when the doctors treated Lou’s burns; she knew how they would heal, how they would scar, if cared for properly. As a nurse, little can surprise her, and as Debbie Ocean, nothing about Lou can appall or dissuade her from her attraction. She is okay. Lou is not. Lou is the one who needs a choice and a comfort.

“You never have to wear those awful bandages again,” Debbie reminds her. 

“I know. Honestly, I can't be bothered by the look of it,” Lou says, touching her unfettered cheek. “I'll have quite a story to tell for these scars.” Her voice wavers, in a way only Debbie can catch. Lou doesn’t give a hoot what strangers on the street may think of her, but no matter what, she will bear a physical reminder of the war she fought and the agony she suffered, an involuntary tattoo in the most exposed of places. It’s not about beauty, nor about what other people think; none of those things matter to Lou. What matters is the story she sees when she looks in the hand mirror, and the inevitability that she’ll struggle to accept it. Debbie only knows because she’s done this before, peeled away the bandages on soldiers’ scars and held them the first time they saw themselves anew, and wept like mother and baby alike, like they’d given birth to a cracked and welded automaton of their own bodies.

So because it is her duty, she offers Lou the hand mirror, and because she is no coward, she does not look away from Lou’s bluebell eyes when she holds the mirror to herself. 

“Oh,” is all that escapes Lou’s lips. Sitting beside her, Debbie hesitantly rests a hand on her shoulder. Lou’s fingers run over the darkened skin of her cheek, stained not unlike a birthmark but roughened irrevocably. The lines, like forked lightning of spidery scar tissue where the third degree burns had been, run like a storm, like a story, curled and calligraphic down her temple. “Oh,” she says again. She blinks, once, twice, then rapidly, as the tears begin to fall. 

“I don’t know why I should be upset,” she protests, even as she cries. “It’s not as if I’m concerned for men to look at me, or that I give a whit what—”

“I know,” replies Debbie, cupping her uninjured cheek. She wonders if the reason for Lou’s tears is the fact that she couldn’t give a whit if she tried. Or perhaps that she gives a whit for women she cannot love, and she weeps because the scars have no bearing on her loneliness. Life after is as life was before. 

It is now that Debbie asks if she can kiss her. Because for Debbie, Life After will never be the same.

 

 **5.**  

 _December 24, 1945_. Debbie sits in a posh leather armchair in the top-floor apartment she shares with Lou. It is homey, if a bit small, and they must be careful in bed for fear of letting their neighbors know the nature of their relationship.

A snowstorm whisks through New York City. Lou bursts through the front door, a crimson scarf wrapped around her shoulders, a black fur coat hiding her suit. She sheds layers desperately as she nears the fire and checks her pocket watch.

“Twenty-two Twenty-five,” she says aloud.

“I was beginning to worry,” Debbie informs her with a slight frown.

“No need. We landed after the first signs of a snowstorm, but as you know traffic was awful as the blizzard started to blow in.” She got the job at the flight school a few months after her recovery. Her record spoke for itself, and she was laughably legendary amongst the midshipman. Something about the mystery of such a battle scar enticed glory-driven young men and granted her immediate respect. Clearly— _clearly_ she had done something incredible and lived to tell the tale. Where Lou once saw a tragedy, her student saw a dramatic film reel, culminating as she hurtled aflame through the Marseilles sky and winding down with her recovery. That's all the scar really says, in the end—she lived to tell the tale.

Debbie pulls her into her lap, and Lou stumbles over with a laugh that rumbles from her chest, freer than any laugh Debbie heard in the hospital. She kisses Lou soundly, fervidly, and begins to work apart the buttons on her suit. 

Lou brings her hand to Debbie’s neck, to the small gold ring on a chain dangling between her collarbones, a symbol of the marriage they cannot share. Debbie shivers at her touch.

“You’re freezing, honey.”

“You could rectify that,” Lou whispers mischievously, nibbling her ear.

Debbie shakes her off but grants her a lingering kiss. “Let the fire warm you up a bit; then you can put your cold hands wherever you please.” 

The hearth flickers invitingly, wafting the smell of pine and burnt wood about the room, even as the smoke curls up the chimney. Lou holds out her hands to the flames. They lap at her, their shadows dancing across her skin. 


	2. Inman, South Carolina

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Lesbian Notebook. Self explanatory.

 

**1.**

Debbie Ocean is a proper young lady, or so she's told. She blushes but only to the softest degree, never trips over her tongue, and knows exactly what to say to make a stranger fall in love with her. The latter skill is perhaps the only facet of ladyhood she sees value in—Debbie Ocean can make people tick. She can read the crowds, move minds. The unspoken rule—she's not supposed to do it on purpose. A lady's not to  _know_ she can manipulate the world like a prop stage. Debbie knows and revels in it. She cons and commands because if she's going to displayed like a front window mannequin, she'll _get_ something out of it. She'll rob crumbs of real life where she can.

A proper young lady doesn’t spend her time with a car mechanic. That’s the first thing Debbie’s father tells her when she meets Lou Miller—the lanky, dust-stained blonde who tinkers with his automobile. Debbie stands in the garage window in her Sunday best while her Frank Ocean pays the bill, watching the mechanic finish up beneath her father's car. "Thank the new boy for me," her father says inside. The new boy—a pair of wiry legs sticking out from beneath the Corvette. 

The new boy slides into the South Carolina sunlight, and Debbie clasps her hand to her chest like the women in the picture shows, because the new boy is a sharp-faced young woman, grinning boyish and cocksure, squinting into the sun with the bluest eyes Debbie has ever seen. "You're a sight for sore eyes," she remarks teasingly. "I'm Lou." She holds out one grease-stained hand. "And you must be Miss Debbie Ocean?"

Her voice sways Debbie on her feet, rich like a fine dessert, and Debbie reaches to shake her hand—

"Time to go, Deb," calls her father. And later, as they drive home, "don't you get close to Lou Miller, sweetheart. She's no good for you."

(Because she’s Debbie, she ignores him.)

**2.**

She prefers to perch in the corner of the garage, her hair coiffed and her dress ironed like she’s on a proper date with a proper man. Lou lies beneath the bed of a truck, her legs bent at an awkward angle in blue coveralls. They chat often. Sometimes, Debbie peers under the car to meet her eyes but really just watches her hands. She slips on motor oil, once, kitten heels sliding out from under her, and Lou catches her in a flash and hoists her onto her feet. Guilt rises in her chest when next time, she pretends to slip just to fall into Lou's arms. 

She knows an Ocean isn’t supposed to like a car mechanic. She also knows a respectable young woman isn’t supposed to like a woman like Lou, with coveralls and unfettered tits and a smoky Aussie drawl that Inman, South Carolina hasn’t dampened one bit. Lou smokes fat cigars reserved for men in pubs and once squared up to fight a boy who came onto Debbie unwanted in the auto garage. He held her dress in his fists, and Lou threatened to knock him into the swamp. "Don't test me," she said, "I've gone up with a full grown gator and won." Debbie wonders if it's true but doesn't really care. 

 _Don’t get too close to that girl,_ warns her mother when she spots Lou walking her home as the sun turns the color of a ripe peach. She doesn’t say why.

(She doesn’t have to—Debbie knows just what her Ma meant when one day Lou shimmies out from under a brick-red sedan and fixes her with a gaze that makes her skin melt and her heart drum against her ribs.) Ma sure doesn’t want a woman like Lou around her daughter, but Debbie knows as soon as Lou looks at her that her Ma is too late. Or maybe her Ma was too late the day Debbie was born, because she’ll let that warning bounce off her like water off a duck’s back. She wants, has always wanted, a woman like Lou to be  _hers_.

**3.**

It is August. Lou dances with her by the fishing pond, a sight for sore eyes in a mens’ suit Debbie suspects she tailored herself, the rich green of kudzu in August, smoking and twirling through the fireflies. Lou kisses her against a gnarled elm, caging them in its branches to sequester their heaving breaths, their knotted bodies, from a town that eats their hearts. Debbie sees her through the haze of being eighteen, of being in love against the world. Lou is a goddamned Shakespeare sonnet, freer than a wild dog yet utterly hers.

Danny, bless him, keeps their secret like the chivalrous brother he is. He’s always hungered for something exciting and transgressive to share—running gambling out of his living room, counterfeiting money by hand, it’s always something new with Danny. But his sister’s secret affair brings out his inner romantic. He would protect them at all costs, Debbie is certain. She loves him for it, but the costs could be dire. 

**4.**

Lou is outed—blatantly, explicitly thrown to the wolves by Debbie’s father, who knew all along she was ‘ _one of those damned queers’_ but only chose this moment, the moment he spies Debbie riding on the back of her bike, clinging to her faded leather coat, to tell. Through Frank Ocean’s eyes, his daughter is the lamb and Lou the beast of lore trying her damndest to defile her. _Do you want your marriage prospects ruined; what if you were seen with her? She could be dangerous._  Debbie wonders if he really believes that when he says it. Does he really think Debbie would never have kissed her? Does he really think she wouldn’t have bared herself, with wanton intention, to a woman like Lou? She can’t imagine a world where she doesn’t.

Predictably, Lou skips town. She has to, or the politicians and torch-bearing neighbors will bear down on her. "That's life," she says, as she kisses Debbie beneath the "Welcome to Inman" sign. She tears into the dusk before they're caught, leaving cicadas in her wake. Debbie's father kicks off the spring with a debutante ball to acquaint Debbie with a sea of prim young men. It would have happened anyway, but Debbie can't help but see the promenade as a celebration of Lou Miller's absence from her life.

It is here she meets the admirable Claude Becker. He begs for her hand in marriage, and what the hell does she have to lose? Claude is charming, reasonably clever, and appreciates the finer things. Her parents absolutely adore him. She's hardly  _fond_ of him; his lips don't suck Shakespeare from her lungs like Lou's, but Debbie sees the snake beneath his sweet eyes and adores it. He's a con—he's not as good as she is at playing the crowd, but his selfishness makes him fun to gossip with. Little awaits her in a place like Inman; the least she can be is entertained.

**5.**

The night before her wedding, she sits beside the fishing pond, listening to cicadas hum in the grass, watching the sky turn blue-grey and roll with an approaching storm. She sucks the sap from a honeysuckle and crushes it beneath her bare toes. Thunder growls; the clouds close in. She wonders, for a moment, how it would feel to be struck by lightning—it's not as if she's actually considering it, or so she tells herself. It's not her wedding she dreads but her own indifference to it. She will not be miserable, married to Claude. She will cease to care, and she reels, roils with nausea, at the prospect of ceasing to care.

Reckless footsteps approach. A callused hand rests on her shoulder that certainly does not belong to silver-spoon Claude, and all of a sudden she’s staring at Lou Miller in the flesh. Lou has grown taller, if that was possible, and definitely richer because she wears the finest burgundy suit Debbie has ever seen and a silver pocketwatch. The thunderhead hail her arrival; Lou always did have a flair for the spectacular.

Debbie kisses her, tasting cinnamon and cigars on her tongue. She fingers the rough-chopped ends of Lou's hair, stands on her shoes and nearly bowls her over with the force her beating body. Two years, that's how long it's been, measured in fresh laughter lines around Lou's lips. Debbie never forgot the quiet drama of a woman like Lou unfolding in her hands. The clouds unleash a downpour, a chorus of thunder like circus drums signaling a death-defying stunt. 

Lou offers her hand. Three gold rings line her fingers. One, she slips off and presses into Debbie's palm. "Come away with me. Let’s get out of this town once and for all." And Debbie does. She sends Claude her sincerest apologies and her finest calligraphy, sealed in the post from New York City. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In response to a challenge to do a Heist Wives AU to the plot of The Notebook.


	3. No Choice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Carol AU for Debbie and Lou. Spawned of a couple of Tumblr requests.

**1.**

Lou sits, swallowed by trench coat and pinstripes, in the back corner of a bar. Sweet-faced men dance drunkenly around her, flinging themselves into swings of jazz. Satchmo croons on the radio, distant and gravelly, as if the wail of a clarinet erupts from a living room record player, rather than rowdy bar. She sways to the beat, losing herself in blues and hard liquor. All of a sudden, two white meaty hands clasp her hips, try unsuccessfully to pull her onto the dance floor. When she throws him off, the tang of her own cigarette smoke makes her ill. 

She didn’t know it was possible to be this tired, this young. She knows what she wants, but she also knows that getting what she wants means losing everything she has. Maybe she’s waiting for an act of a God she doesn’t believe in, or maybe she’s waiting for someone to make losing her job, her friends, her apartment—all worth it. Maybe underneath the suit and the fuck-you facade, she’s a romantic. Indifference protects the sad sack of bones and blood that is her body from trespassers and judgement, but she can only save herself for so long. That's how it always ends, for people like her in New York. They cage themselves until they can't take it anymore; someone star-bright and beautiful enters their orbit, and they fall in love. They get reckless. They fuck themselves over. So she sits, and she smokes, and watches the world through vapor.

 

**2.**

If Lou is tired, Debbie is downright cynical. She hides the cynicism beneath blush and furs, the mesmerizing wit of a high-society woman, but anyone looking closely can tell she chokes on every breath. Her face has hardened like volcanic rock, constantly squared for a confrontation. She plants manufactured kisses on her ex-husband's cheek, shakes the hands of old friends, every gesture of affection muted and restrained.  _Take a vacation_ , Tammy urges her. Tammy is a Godsend, but she can’t take a vacation, not now. Not when the divorce papers are half-written, not when banishing Claude from her life might mean losing Dani forever. Her daughter, the only thing more precious to her than freedom, the only reason she’d not fucked off years ago to God knows where. She doesn't trust Claude not to seize Dani from her "deviant" mother in her absence.

Rock, meet hard place. 

 

**3.**

Lou reruns her life like a movie reel, trying to figure out where she went wrong. In every life, she is the brazen bar pianist playing the score of a world that passes her by. In every life, she wears a pinstripe suit; she admires green-eyed women in underground bars. She speaks bluntly without giving away a whit of herself. In every life, it is like this. She doesn't have a choice. She built her heart a cage when she was young, and spent the rest of her life struggling against the bars. 

 In this life, she wears a Santa hat and an emerald green vest and plays jingles for the tourists passing by her shop window. In this life, she meets the eyes of a woman across the street, and her fingers jam on a dissonant chord. The woman moves like a bird, lithe and light, more dangerous than she looks. When she disappears in the rush of traffic, Lou returns her attention to the piano. The piano can’t get her into trouble, after all.

“You might not be the right person to ask, but is there a toy shop nearby? I don’t come often to the city.”

“Just around the corner—” Lou looks up to those rich, molasses eyes. The woman wears a smooth black coat, smooth like licorice candy as it slides down your throat. She moves with a wispy grace, curled brown hair loose in the wind. Her fingers flutter elegantly over the piano, skimming the surface. Lou swallows, returns the woman's wan smile. Her body, in step, arches around Lou in high heels.

Later, Lou will think of the florescent light of Macy's bouncing off Debbie's irises. She’ll never remember what she sees that day in Debbie’s eyes but it changes her forever. Maybe the cosmos are fucking with her. Maybe it’ll all be worth it. 

“I’ll show you to the toy shop,” she tells the woman now, because did she ever have a choice? She escorts her outside, down the block in her vivid green suit and crimson Santa hat. She doesn’t notice when the wind picks up her hat and tosses it into the street because she’s too busy being asked her name and told, “I’m Debbie. It was lovely to meet you.”

Later, she will find Debbie knocking on her store window, holding the baubled hat on her fingertips. She asks Lou to lunch, and she doesn’t refuse. Did she ever have a choice?

 

**4.**

Lou knows they’re fucked from the second Debbie pulls into her driveway. She meets Dani and Tammy and gets off on the wrong foot with one Claude Becker from the start, and the guilt starts to knot her chest like poisonous roots. Who is she to rip this woman away from her life?

(Debbie, for her part, seems to want nothing more than to be ripped way, from everything except poor Dani.)

She stays, though. She sees Debbie again and again, despite her wiser instincts screaming otherwise. She nearly gets into it with Claude, only a few days after Christmas, and Debbie gets into it on her behalf. Then they’re fleeing, fleeing the city and the smog-choked sky and the houses littered with people who know them. The cosmos offer them a week of contentment and a desperate bid to get out of town.

A slick-voiced news anchor rings in the new year; horns wail obnoxiously; Lou is listening to none of it. She is sitting on the edge of their stiff motel mattress as Debbie pads about the hotel room in a silk kimono. She is humming Satchmo as the world passes her by. Debbie runs a hand through her hair, letting it settle wildly against her back. Lou memorizes the details of Debbie's bare face, sans lipstick and smoky barriers. Debbie opens the window and blows a puff of cigar smoke.

"My brother used to smoke these," she says, barely audible. "Since he died, I smoke them when I want to live a little." She passes it to Lou.

Lou takes it. Her body does not afford her a choice. Every bone trembles for Debbie Ocean, in her silk robe, smoking out the window into hundreds of miles of wheat fields as 1952 draws to an eventful close. Debbie holds the cigar between her fingers and gently, almost hesitantly, takes Lou's chin in her hand. Her eyes glisten. She kisses her, sliding from her chair over Lou's lap and unbuttoning Lou's pinstriped vest. The cigar falls to the carpet. A trail of smoke dances, forgotten, from the stub.

When they uncurl from each other’s bodies in some tornado-beaten town in Nowhere, Missouri, Lou glows like a candle, softened against Debbie’s furs and warm skin.

Then the worst. The man outside their window with a camera, a look of desperation on Debbie’s face that Lou cannot fathom experiencing. Helplessness in her gut as rock and hard place drain the life from Debbie’s eyes. Lou knows Debbie will leave—doesn't hurt less when she wakes up alone, to Tammy pounding on the door. She knows Debbie would stick a stake through her heart for her daughter, and she understands. She knows, regardless, that she will hurt because of Debbie Ocean. That Debbie will hurt because of her. That both wounds will leave permanent scars. She knows they’re fucked. They've never had a choice.

 

**5.**

Sitting at the bar piano, belting out the lyrics to Satchmo’s latest blues, she wonders not for the first time if this is how Debbie felt when they met. Cynical. She counts time in alcohol and tips; after all, you can't number the beats in Louis Armstrong's blues. She hits a low note in sync with the wail of a trumpet player—Constance, good kid, steals them Scotches all night to wipe away their sorrows. She looks up, the world shimmering in a haze of liquor and the rusty trill of her own vocal chords, and there is Debbie Ocean. Debbie sits and smokes, listening to the roll of the song. Watching the world pass her by.

Debbie smiles. Lou smiles back.

She has a choice.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was inevitable.


	4. The truth is out there

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Debbie Ocean has a reputation to live up to. Lou Miller believes in little green men. "Grey, actually," she informs Debbie, as their headlights glimmer through the Indiana night.

1.

1992\. Debbie Ocean has a reputation to live up to. It comes with her name, with her slick blouse, and her medical degree. She could have been a well-respected doctor, or so her father takes every opportunity to remind her, as if she didn't grow up with the Army brats, running wild like foxes across the airfields while fighter jets screamed in a perfect loop above them. She is a product of dandelions growing in the cracks of runways, plucked and blown into air that reeks of jet fuel. She is a product of hot asphalt on bare feet, hand-me-down cargos belted tightly around her slight hips. Fresh off her brother's death in Kuwait, she joins the FBI because it sounds more interesting than inevitably working as an assistant to some patronizing male doctor until she can open her own practice. The disapproval her career choice engenders only eggs her on. She digs her heels into the Bureau and racks up an impressive solve rate. She may be the family disappointment, but she’s a sharper shot than any of them. 

When she's first assigned to the X Files, she can't help but wonder if it's a political move. Lock the ambitious woman in the basement with a collection of unsolvable cases gathering fifty years of dust. When the Assistant Director asks her, "are you familiar with Special Agent Louise Miller and the widespread conspiracies her work is attempting to unravel?" Debbie is certain it's a political move—not against her, but against Agent Miller, and she knows that moment she'll take the assignment. Because Spooky Miller may believe in some weird shit, but these bureaucratic asshats are trying use the resident medical doctor to sabotage her, and Debbie won't have that. No one  _uses_ Debbie Ocean.

 

"So," Lou asks her upon her arrival to the basement office. "They finally sent someone to spy on me."

 

Debbie cocks her eyebrow. "I'm not a spy, but go ahead and believe that."

 

"Yeah," says Lou, kicking her feet onto the desk. "Sure you're not." She cracks the shell of a sunflower seed and pops it into her mouth. Her eyes flick to the gaudily-labeled bag of seeds. She holds it out to Debbie, jiggling its contents in her palm. "Want one?"

 

"I'm okay."

 

"So, Deborah Ocean, who'd you piss off to get stuck down here with old Spooky?"

 

"I think  _you_ ticked them off to get me sent down here, to be frank."

 

Lou snorts. "Don't flatter yourself, honey."

 

"Well, I was assigned to lend some credibility to the department. Your cases deal with unexplained phenomena, and perhaps I can provide scientific explanations."

 

"I'll let you know when I have an alien corpse you can dissect," Lou snarks, turning back to a stack of projector slides. 

 

"Damn," Debbie retorts, dropping her briefcase and in the absence of a second desk, hovering over Lou's shoulder. "And I thought you had an open mind."

 

In the following weeks, Lou proves to possess a  _very_ open mind. Lou Miller believes in extra-terrestrials—even thinks she  _saw_ one, says Jan at the water cooler—and that’s about all anyone can tell you about her. Which is a shame, Debbie thinks not a week after she meets Spooky Miller in the dank Hoover Building basement. There’s a lot more to Lou than little green men and tiny ties and sunflower shells littered over the desks. Not that Debbie believes in UFOs, or Sasquatch, or lake monsters lurking in the deep. She’s… curious, that’s all. More curious about Lou than any X-File in that basement office. So she stays.

 

2.

1994\. Debbie didn’t expect to break the law and chase conspiracies with a smoking hot woman who wears velvet suits to work, but she’s not complaining. There's something thrilling about the X Files, the long nights in rental cars and flashlights beaming into the woods. This is Lou's element. She speaks with gusto, and she’s smart enough that Debbie listens, even if she’s ready to smack Lou the next time she hears about Mothmen. After work, they go out to a local dive bar; Debbie drinks a martini and Lou a shot of straight vodka.

 

One night, one grimy stakeout night waiting for the horned Jersey Devil some woman claimed attacked her, Debbie glances over at her partner and nearly cracks. Lou shines, literally gleams in the dim camp lantern. She sits cross-legged in the driver's seat of their baby blue rental, parked in a wooded pullout miles from civilization. Her turquoise suit coat catches moonlight like fireflies in a jar. She stares at a point in the distance, as if she's seeing something Debbie never will, as if seeing is believing. Lou has always seen something otherworldly in a New Jersey wood. Debbie wants to believe.

 

It is then Debbie realizes—maybe, just maybe, she's going to fall for this charismatic nutcase who rides a puttering motorcycle with “ALIEN” vanity plates and never comes down from the stars.

 

(Maybe she already has.)

 

3.

1998\. They’re married long before they’re married. She has a key to Lou's apartment and she feeds the guppies when her partner's away on a case. Margerie, Frank, and Danny, in the order of their acquisition. Margerie Debbie knows is named after Lou's long-since-passed mother. Frank after her brother who vanished in a flash of light, the whir of an unidentified craft and lit in Lou a fiery quest for the capital-T Truth that has left them no one to trust but each other. Danny, the last and smallest guppy, is named after Debbie's own brother whose climbed on a flying craft and never came home. Whose body couldn't be returned from Kuwait, whose classified mission couldn't be revealed upon his death.

 

Lou names the guppy Danny, after Debbie weeps in a hotel bathtub on the anniversary of his passing. It is Lou who holds her shaking shoulders.

 

One night in a dingy motel room between reruns of the 1960s Godzilla, Debbie kisses Lou over the remains of takeout Chinese. She snaps, takes her partner by the lapels and smashes their lips together. She threads her fingers through her partner’s wild hair and shoves her into the rickety mattress of a shit bed-and-breakfast in Thatcher, Michigan. They knock over a beer bottle; it shatters on the floor. Debbie notices; Lou doesn't. Afraid they'll lose seven years of momentum, afraid that if she parts her lips from Lou's some spell will break, the heat of their bodies die, Debbie doesn't say a thing.

 

Lou fucks her thoroughly, insatiably, as the neon pink of Motel 8 sign flickers outside the window. The next morning, Debbie cuts her feet on the beer bottle. Lou drives her to Urgent Care on the way to an active crime scene.

 

4.

2000\. One of them is always dying, it seems. Her eyes have never looked quite so beautiful as when they first fix upon the lights in the sky. Debbie can’t believe what she’s seeing. A spinning ship, flood lights dancing over their bodies like a disco. Debbie wonders if David Bowie was onto something. Lou's always thought so, and she grins something spectacular when the lithe, grey silhouettes of something Debbie won't call aliens grace their peripheral vision. In a flash, her partner is gone; she’s unconscious; the earth’s core cracks beneath her feet.

 

They find her too late. Her funeral is an underwhelming affair in a family plot Lou never wanted to be a part of. Debbie drowns Claude Becker in a cup of seltzer when he's first assigned to her. She is wearing Lou's blue velvet blazer to work, and it doesn't escape Claude's notice. She can't help but take Lou on, as if her lover has become an ideology she wears to keep herself sane. It is lovemaking—taking Lou into her, holding her close and squeezing like the stars will fall away if she lets go. 

 

Lou is quite literally six feet under. Until, one day, she’s not. The nails are pried from her coffin, and she gasps back to life in a hospital cot. She has wasted away the winter like a creature in hibernation, emerging feebly in April with no explanation to speak of. Debbie knows when she sees Lou’s chapped lips, her shit-eating grin, one callused hand on Debbie’s tear-stained cheek—it’s time to run.

 

5.

2001\. They run, in a beat-down truck, into the cornfields and red horizons of their youth, blowing dust behind them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In celebration of Ocean's 8 being released to Amazon and DVD and whatnot today, I'm going to try and post the next couple chapters.


	5. Hogwarts, only gayer

1.

To the surprise of no one, Debbie Ocean is sorted into Slytherin. After all, she's the descendent of brilliant con artists and the bumbling little sister of Slytherin's heartthrob Quidditch captain Danny Ocean. Her entire family has been Slytherin for centuries, excepting her Aunt Ida, who's sitting at the faculty table as head of Hufflepuff House, smiling proudly at her niece nonetheless.

 _It's a blood feud thing,_ she hears a kid whisper in another's ear, gesturing to the Slytherin table. She fixes him with her fiercest glare as she passes, along with a rude gesture she learned from her brother. It is not a  _blood_ thing, ending up at the Slytherin table (it is with her mother and her Uncle Jack, but she isn't counting the relatives she doesn't like). It's a point of pride for a budding master thief. 

To the surprise of everyone, (most of all herself, judging from her expression) Lou Miller is sorted into Gryffindor. She sits for two whole minutes beneath the sorting hat while it mumbles and growls to itself, eventually deciding that her recklessness in the face of danger and a locked-and-loaded hero complex outweigh her cunning disregard for law and order. 

For her part, she greets the Gryffindor table with a forced smile that her classmates hesitantly return. It doesn't help that she's related to an ex Death Eater—the cruel and thankfully dead Coulton Miller, a grandfather she didn't ask for, who probably would've hexed her for her men's suits and gold chain regardless of how good a witch she became. Sure, she can't help her relatives (no one knows that better than an Ocean), but it doesn't make the Gryffindor House any less apprehensive of her, and it doesn't make her any happier to be there. 

Deep down, a part of her is grateful. This Debbie knows, because as a young child she prayed to be sorted anywhere but Slytherin for the very reason one kid so subtly pointed out just moments earlier. The secret fear of bearing evil in her blood lingers, and Lou fears as Debbie once did that the Sorting Hat would see a Death Eater lurking in her soul and feed it, sending her to Slytherin not for he ambition but for the seeds of cruelty passed forcibly to her like a family mantle. Debbie outgrew that fear as her brother grew into a charming young man. Fleeing her parents' home to live with her friendly squib uncle until the Hogwarts invitation arrived, Lou Miller never did. 

 

2.

For a year, Lou bathes in the isolation of being an unwilling Gryffindor. She shuns her robes and her classmates and smokes in the corridor bathroom, by moaning Myrtles stall, watching the ash from her enchanted pipe turn purple, green, pink at the flick of her wand. For a time, her closest friend is the sleek black cat her uncle sent to school with her, affectionately named Chimera. 

She meets Constance in her second year, when she hears the younger girl call for 'Chimmy' from across the common room. Chimmy, she soon learns, is Chimera, and her cat lazily stretches its back before slinking over to Constance for a contraband treat. Lou arches her eyebrow at Constance through uneven blonde fringe. The kid shoots her a grin that she can't brush aside, even if her relationship to her housemates is apathetic on an average day.

"What did you feed my cat?" she inquires, and she knows she intimidates the kid. She'll make up for it later; now, she wants to know if Chimera just ate something that could hurt it. 

Constance shrinks but holds her ground, adjusting a red and gold beanie on her head. "Uhhhhh, chicken. I nicked some from the kitchens," she confessed. "I mean—I've been doing it for days; he just  _likes_ it. She follows me to the potions room when I go see Nine Ball. She almost knocked over the bottle of amortentia we were brewing for class next week." She laughs guiltily, as if the cat hadn't almost stricken itself with a love potion.

Typical that Chimera makes friends more easily than she does.

Debbie Ocean, on the other hand, uses those impeccable social skills to form an eclectic group of friends. Rose and Tammy, third year Ravenclaws who she almost sends to the hospital practicing her hexes, and Amita, who runs brightly in so many social circles Debbie can't help but wonder if she has a time turner. Not to mention Daphne Kluger, whose best friend will always be herself, but who's loaded with hot gossip every time she returns to the Slytherin Common Room.

"You talk to her yet, Ocean?" Daphne drawls from the sleek leather sofa, as Debbie steps through the painting. 

"Who?"

"Don't bullshit me." She snaps her gum. "I'm talking about Miller. The one you keep ogling in Care of Magical Creatures."

(One morning, Hagrid guided them to the forest and introduces them to a fucking hippogryph, and Lou takes to it like no one predicted. Debbie was mesmerized watching her handle the perilous creature. Lou almost— _almost—_ had Hagrid convinced to let her take one of the baby monster-spiders back to her common room. Debbie, enamored but unwilling to be straightforward about it, stole one for her and charmed it to keep its size in check. Call it a gift from a secret admirer.)

"Kind of."

 

3.

Debbie goes out for Quidditch. So does Lou. 

At fourteen, Debbie needs something to keep her hands occupied, keep her energy in check. When she ends up taking over her brother's legacy as Slytherin Seeker, she doesn't expect the opposition to be so distracting. She keeps her eye on the ball. (Not, of course, the frosty blonde who wears a leather coat over her scarlet robes until she steps onto the field, flicks her gaze about the stadium like she fucking owns the place, shoots Debbie a gloriously crooked, shit-eating grin just before she dives after the Golden Snitch.)

Lou needs to make herself proud. Of her accomplishments, of her sexuality, of her House. She takes on a wild training schedule, pretends to ignore the hots-for-you look of the girl live announcing her first game, then hooks up with her in the prefect bathroom. She saves her money for a Firebolt, and soon her nights become a wild affair of training, one-night stands, and catching fireflies to feed the spider someone gifted her without a name. 

(She's not sure if it was meant to be a prank. Either way, she adores the little beast.)

She finally speaks to the infamous Debbie Ocean after losing to her in a practice match. 

"Nice catch." Lou claps her on the shoulder as she passes by.

"Damn straight," Debbie replies with a smirk that despite its good nature, just oozed mischief. 

"Don't get cocky, Ocean." Two can play this game—she lets her voice drop to the sultry, husky drawl that has melted at least one girl's knees in her time. Then she vanishes into the Slytherin locker rooms, leather coat dangling off her shoulder.

(It is from here that Debbie works up the courage to talk to Lou in Care of Magical Creatures. To befriend her, because Debbie Ocean is not a one night stand unless she's the one leaving in the morning.)

They are inseparable. Fuck House rules; they beat each other in Quidditch, opposing Seekers, and after the game split a pint of butterbeer and run through plays. Debbie meets the full-grown Acromantula she placed in Lou's rucksack. Lou meets the Ocean charm; it sucks her in like warm syrup, like the caramel of Debbie's eyes.

 

4.

Summer finds them in opposite corners of the universe. Debbie gets a boyfriend; Lou gets a dragon. She spends her summer in a dragon sanctuary in the Highlands, working with a weatherbeaten, many-scarred Irishman who speaks to more dragons than people. She prefers it to the hustle and bustle of London, for although she's always up for night life, the daily grind has never suited her. She likes people much better when it's too dark, too bursting with alcohol and charms and flickering lights in one hall or the next to carry on small talk and pick apart each other's identities. 

Debbie comes back to Hogwarts with a broken heart, fucked and fucked over by one Claude Becker, who nearly got her expelled when he framed her for his own acts of underage wizardry. Lou comes back to Hogwarts with fresh scars, dragon claws and mild burns and a lot more leather on her person, and promptly hexes Claude Becker into next week. His boxers hang from the whomping willow like Christmas decorations. He has mule's ears and a black eye for a week. Lou becomes a legend, then—something untouchably kick-ass, a woman admired and feared for no particular reason, spoken of more than spoken to. Some days, she minds. 

In December, she crawls beneath the Quidditch stands and kisses Debbie Ocean against the rickety posts of the Slytherin box. Mistletoe vines weave through the posts like a labyrinth. She wakes up in Debbie's bed on Christmas Eve and shares her coffee in the Slytherin common room.

"Am I interrupting?" Daphne Kluger's saccharine voice slices through the tender moment. She sits on the other sofa, knees drawn up sideways, leaning innocently against the armrest. "Thank God you two finally got it together. The whole of Slytherin had a poll about when we'd find you naked in a supply closet." She shoots them a perky smile and dusts something invisible off her festive green silk robe. "You did it the classy way, though." Turning to Debbie— "did you sneak her in the way I taught you?"

It's like this for months, friends, acquaintances, and random students gossiping about their love life as if they're hot shit. (They are, Lou informs Constance and Nine Ball with a smirk one evening.) But something about their blossoming romance reminds the students that the color of their robes doesn’t mean as much as they think it does. Certainly, it doesn’t determine their fate. Even before they fell into bed, fell in love, fell head over heels like a fucking avalanche, they had something to prove about what the Sorting Hat had in store for them all those years ago. Their houses were merely guidelines; their choices determined their fate.

 

5.

In her seventh year, Lou enters the Triwizard tournament. The cup spits out her name in a crimson blaze, and Hogwarts erupts into applause. Durmstrang hosts the cup, and Lou Miller is quite the match for bare-rock, wind-stripped Bulgarian mountains. Debbie, clever Head Girl of Slytherin House and ever a doting lover, devises every strategy to help her win.

For the first task, Lou summons a goddamned full-size Acromantula to stave off the fae beasts that impede her trek through the forests. She fights her way through poisoned vines and living trees strangling her with their roots to catch a beetle-winged scroll. Perched on her bunk, Debbie beside her and surrounded by half the Gryffindor house, Lou opens the scroll. 

First challenge on land, second challenge in water. 

But first—the Yule Ball. She'd be lying if she said she didn't look forward to it. She and Debbie are something to behold; together, they up the eyes that follow them. Perhaps it's because she's a Triwizard champion, but here, people watch her with discomfort. Maybe it's the competition; maybe its her grandfather's name coming back to haunt her. When she stalks into Durmstrang Hall in a lurid, beetle-green velvet suit with Debbie Ocean clinging to her arm, pressing a scarlet kiss to her cheek, she doesn't give a damn. 

She nearly freezes to death the second challenge. She dives beneath the surface of a glacial lake, into a world of underwater ice castles and gleaming black squid. Constance and Debbie orchestrate a heist of the potions stores for a handful of gillyweed. She can't deny the exhilaration of running her fingers down her neck and feeling gills ripple across her skin. When she rises to the surface with one enchanted cat frozen in a block of ice and thaws it, hugging Chimera to her chest, her spine burns as the gills disappear, her webbed fingers stretching and splitting in the sunlight. She wishes she could keep them. 

"I kind of wish that too," Debbie says later, by the fire. "You could take me on all sorts of underwater adventures."

Lou chuckles. "Oh? I just liked the look of them."

The final challenge caters to Lou Miller more perfectly than she could expect. A massive, jagged maze of snow and granite weaves through the canyons of the Pirin Mountains. "There are four dragons wandering the maze," explains the Minister of Magic. "The dragon will choose you. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to make it to the Triwizard Cup, in the company of your dragon. Regardless of whether that company is friendly or hostile."

Lou vanishes into the awe-inspiring scenery. Debbie chews her teeth, listening to the occasional scream of a dragon, the plumes of flame and smoke that erupted in distant corners of the maze. She holds Tammy's hand as if she's giving birth, squeezing it every time a boulder cracks. A flash of blue light gives away a spell, and a broomstick flies over their heads. Debbie watches it until it vanishes into an endless sky, wondering if it's Lou's.

As the afternoon goes on, local thunderheads swarm the peaks. The sky convulses over their heads; fingers of lightning reach out for the mountain tops and fork across their line of vision. The tournament goes on. For hours, it goes on, silence followed by thunder followed by the raucous calls of birds. 

Through the ceaseless drum of the storm, Debbie thinks she hears a cannon. Her spine stiffens. "Tammy!" she shakes a half-dozing Tammy. "Someone finished!"

A hush. A tense, spine-tingling hush. Then—A Hungarian wormtail bursts through the clouds. Lou Miller stands on its spined back, scorched and scratched and definitely favoring one leg but very much alive. 

She wins, by the skin of her teeth, but it comes at a cost. But Debbie Ocean is there to help her back to her feet, stand beside her during awkward interviews with wizarding publications.  _You rode a dragon,_ sums up the headlines,  _Triwizard champion does something appropriately reckless and wins by it._ The photograph displays Lou's wide, self-satisfied grin, brimming with adventure and naughtiness. She holds the Triwizard cup beneath her arm, her other hand propped against a sleek black cane. The head of the cane opens its mouth and roars, a thick-maned lion, before transforming into an emerald serpent baring its teeth at the press. Debbie Ocean's arm wraps around her shoulders. Daily Prophet be damned, when Lou’s bandaged hand holds up the Triwizard Cup for Hogwarts, Debbie shoves aside half a dozen reporters to plant one on her champion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't resist. I know a lot of people headcanon Lou as Slytherin or Hufflepuff and Debbie as Ravenclaw, but ya know? This whole thing is about the Houses mean something different to everyone, so this is my personal headcanon. Fuck stereotypes, and all that.
> 
> Also, a tip of the hat to the charming, spectacular emkat79, the other patron of the snake cane in Those You’ve Known. Cheers, love!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for playing! Requests can be submitted to poeticsandaliens on Tumblr; I might not get to them quickly, but one day I shall. Until then, I'll be posting the finished headcanons on AO3 as I get a chance to edit and fine tune them.


End file.
